The art and business of film with Bob Strauss

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Monthly Archives: June 2011

For awhile there, The Names of Love’s agenda seems to be all about getting a French girl out of her clothes. Actress Sara Forestier is so adorable, that’s amusing for awhile, but just when you’re ready to ask how much director Michel Leclerc thinks he can get
away with, this sophisticated sex farce evolves into a rich and moving treatise on what it’s meant to be French for the last 75 years.
As Forestier’s half-North African Bahia takes political commitment to an unusual degree – she seduces right wingers of various stripes in a harebrained effort to convert them to her more liberal views – Arthur (Jacques Gamblin), the older, half-Jewish
scientist who’s the closest thing to her real boyfriend, comes to terms with a lifetime’s worth of avoided epiphanies.
Every skeleton in the collective Gallic closet – Nazi collaboration, the Algerian and Vietnamese debacles, cultural revolutions and their failure, the place that that whole “thank heaven for little girls” attitude comes from -and much more gets addressed and woven into the very real growth the odd couple undergoes. The political is made personal, and how, often via high risk narrative and cinematic tricks that succeed
beyond any reasonable exppectations.
Bahia’s anti-racist screwing around hits an ironic wall when she targets a radical Muslim, Arthur figures out a way to combat the memory of the Holocaust with whipped
cream. I already hear some people screaming about how inappropriate and offensive the whole thing sounds. But history and human nature are nothing if not inappropriate and offensive, and Leclerc celebrates the goodness (or, at least, the naked joy) we can all get out of life anyway.